The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

Horror prickled over me like a violent rash. “Burned down? What happened?”

“There was fire.”

“Yeah, thanks, but does anyone know what started it?”

“No. Fire destroyed everything. House. Farm. Horses.”

“And Lazlo?” I asked, my voice dry and husky.

“They think he was inside house. In cellar.”

“What do you mean think?” I asked. “Did they recover his body or didn’t they?”

“No one will go to farm now. Ghosts have been seen.”

“Ghosts? What ghosts?”

“Do you want me to take you back to town?”

“No, I want you to take me to the farm,” I answered stubbornly.

“I can take you in morning.”

“There’s no time,” I said, which was true. If the Front could be believed, I had roughly two days until Lich’s return—and one of those days would involve travel back to the States.

I expected Olga to object, but she released the brake, and the truck began to rumble forward again. We rode in silence. She twisted the headlights on shortly and rain sliced through the beams. The forests and fields darkened around us. Olga snapped on the radio, and a man singing a sad ballad crackled from the speakers. I refused to believe she had the right farm, refused to believe it had burned to the ground and that Lazlo was … missing? dead?

No, I decided. Once I show her where it is, she’ll realize she was thinking of a different farm, a different person. But I couldn’t forget what Connell had told me about Lich eliminating the most powerful wizards, sacrificing them in his effort to bring the Whisperer into our world.

After thirty minutes that seemed longer than the flight over the Atlantic, a derelict chapel appeared among some trees. “The turnoff is up here on the right,” I said, squinting past the headlight beams and pointing. “There. The farm is about a kilometer down that drive.”

Olga pulled in front of the drive and idled. “This is as near as I will go.”

I almost asked her why before remembering what she’d said about the ghosts. This was the farm she’d been thinking of.

“Do you mind waiting for me?” I asked.

She looked at the bills I held toward her. “One hour,” she said at last, accepting them. “Do you have light?”

I started to nod before realizing my staff wouldn’t work as well in the rain, especially if it started coming down harder. Olga reached beneath her seat and handed me a brick-shaped flashlight. When I snapped it on, shadows sprung over Olga’s face, making her appear sinister.

“Beware the ghosts,” she said. “You will know them by their whispers.”

Her words sent a bone-deep chill through me. Gripping the flashlight and my cane, I stepped out of the truck and into the Romanian night.

I made my way up the drive, rain pattering over a poncho I’d pulled from my pack and slid into. Though it had been more than a decade, I remembered every turn in the dirt drive and even some of the larger trees that bordered it. Toward the end of my training, Lazlo had challenged me to direct force invocations down the winding drive to a target without rustling the leaves. It was as hard as it sounds.

At the final turn, I stopped and looked out over an open yard that was almost unrecognizable.

No.

Olga was right. The place had been decimated by fire, and judging by the weeds growing up through the heaps of charred timber, it had happened a number of years ago. I stepped forward, shining the flashlight over the ruins of the main house and then the barn. The place where Lazlo had helped me to construct my mental prism, to strengthen and hone it, push energy through it … gone.

Even the fencing that had once penned his beloved horses, Mariana and Mihai, had burned to the ground. My heart thudded sickly in my chest.

I turned back to where the house had once stood. Though I could see nothing through my wizard’s senses, dark energies seemed to pollute the atmosphere. Perhaps my own sense of foreboding. Far away in the mountains, wolf cries echoed.

They think he was inside house, Olga had said. In cellar.

I drew my sword and aimed it at the hill of ruins. “Vigore!” I shouted.

Energy pulsed bright from the blade, overcoming the dampness to slam into the ruins and plow it back in a wave. Chunks of charred timber rained down in the fields beyond. With a second force invocation, I cleared the remaining debris from the trapdoor that led down to Lazlo’s cellar.

I stood over the door and listened. All I could hear was the rain tapping my poncho. The door broke away when I pulled the handle—the hinges had been baked black. I set the door aside and shone the flashlight down the steps. During my time with him, Lazlo had forbidden me from going down to his lab. That had been fine by me and my phobia then, but now I had no choice.

If Lazlo had been trapped, his remains might tell me something.

I set the flashlight down and, with a Word, summoned a glowing shield and descended. The steps groaned underfoot. At the bottom of the steps, I grew my light out. The brightness revealed a small room overgrown with black mushrooms and mold. Similar to what I’d seen in the Refuge, the wet growth swarmed over everything: stacks of old books, shelves holding vials and spell implements, even over the remnants of a casting circle that took up most of the floor.

In the circle’s center lay a mound. No, a body.

Lazlo?

The body was on its side, facing away from me. As I approached, my light illuminated wisps of dark hair, a deflated wool sweater and trousers, the last tucked into a pair of battered rubber boots. Kneeling, I set my sword down, gripped the body’s bony shoulder, and pulled it toward me. For a moment the body stuck to the ground before releasing with a wet rip.

“Jesus!” I cried, and jumped back.

My heart thundered in my chest as I looked at